Info

The improv blog with attitude.

Posts tagged David Razowsky

Choose another tag?

There’s a ton of comedy-related podcasts out there, with more being added every day (or so it seems). So it takes something pretty special to break through the clutter and grab our attention.

Well, get ready to add A.D.D. with Dave Razowsky and Ian Foley to your must-hear playlist.

Few people have as much depth and breadth of experience in improv as David Razowsky. His joyful outlook on life, sense of humour, and famous friends-slash-guests make this podcast a true standout.

The conversations are funny, interesting, and wonderfully honest. Whether you’re an improv student, a seasoned actor, or just a fan of comedy, you’ll find inspiration as well as entertainment.

Guests include Phil LaMarr, Susan Messing, Rick Shapiro, Joel Murray, George Wendt, and most recently, someone by the name of Stephen Colbert.

Stay tuned for the Colbert episode, November 21st on iTunes.

Photo © David Razowsky

At the risk of sounding like the old man standing on his porch shouting “Get off my lawn, you kids,” I need to kvetch.

One of the reasons many see improvisers as the 19th century public saw actors (“No Dogs or Actors Allowed!”) is that we don’t carry ourselves in a professional manner. We aren’t acting professionally nor are we treating each other professionally.

In the past month I’ve had three groups who’ve hired me to coach them cancel at the last minute. It’s unprofessional and it’s a bad precedent. I’ve lost work, time and money. I and many of the other teachers and coaches and directors that are hired spend a great deal of time preparing for these sessions, thinking about how to help individual casts find their voice, finesse their shows, further their careers, and, perhaps, make money. Yes, make money.

If you’re doing this for the art, cool, I get it. But there’s also a few shekels to be made from some of this work. The more of us who see the possibilities in that, the more the public will respond to the strong work being presented. The more we work on our craft with focused professionals the better we look. The better we look the more the public will see how great this art form can be. Should you blow off rehearsals when you’ve hired someone to come and work with you, you’re not just diluting the power of your work, you’re also continuing this idea that theatrical improvisation is merely a parlor game, or a series of easy jokes, or an evening of sloppy work delivered by shitty actors. I know that’s not who we are. I know we are able to do better.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. By the same token, you are the one that’s ultimately responsible for you being treated respectfully and honorably. If I say, “Hey, it’s okay that we scheduled a rehearsal and no one showed up,” that doesn’t serve any of us.

I allow you to treat me the way you do. Should I stand up and say, “No, we can all do better,” that doesn’t just make me stronger, it makes all of us see this work with professional eyes and hearts.

Honor me and my time. In the end that will serve us all.

Photo © Kevin Thom

Jeremy Voltz is a wicked funny, crazy smaht improviser, singer, and mathlete. (Check it: He’s currently studying for his PhD in the subject.) He is a member of acapella singing group Countermeasure, and the improv singing sensation JerJosh and the SteveCams.

While you’re getting notes, how often have you heard “You guys were tentative out there,” or “You were in your heads”? It happens to all improvisers at some point, and even though we can point it out when it happens, it’s not so clear what causes it, or how to fix it. But let’s talk about it anyway!

Here’s my take on what goes on in your brain when you’re on the side of the stage, watching a scene. Of course you listen intently to what’s happening on the stage, because that’s what you’ve been trained to do. You’re listening for an idea so that when that scene ends and you find yourself on the stage, you’ve got something great to initiate. You’re listening for inspiration.

For example, you’re watching the scene and you hear one of your teammates, fed up with their crappy doctor, shout, “What, did you get your medical degree at clown school?” And instantly, you picture clown medical school, the whole thing, with doctors all dressed as clowns, administering 50cc of seltzer to the face, and you love it and want to see it and want to play with it. Oh crap, what’s happening in the scene now?

This is your conscious mind doing all of this extrapolating and laughing at how funny your inspiration is. You can try to turn it off, but clown medical school is fucking funny, so don’t beat yourself up over thinking about it. Cool, we’ll come back to this whole inspiration thing.

There’s also a completely different background process in your brain, at an unconscious level, which is silently evaluating the current scene for an edit. IT IS CRAZY GOOD AT KNOWING WHEN A SCENE IS DONE. You just feel it, you know, it’s instinctual, basal. It’s just a bell that goes off when the third hilarious heightened thing happens, or the angry character shoots the other in the chest and then just stares hauntedly at the gun he’s holding. You know when that scene is over, in your gut.

Now, when your explosive desire to edit a scene lines up with that great, hilarious thing you’re compelled to initiate (clown medical school), it’s magical. But most of the time, they don’t happen at the same time. My belief is that often, hesitancy on stage is the inability to deal with the fact that these two things happen at different times. “I know the scene needs to end, but that funny thing I was inspired to do doesn’t make sense anymore, so I can’t edit!”

It’s a pickle, no doubt about it. Both of these feelings you get are compulsions. If you subscribe to the Dave Razowsky style of play, you follow your compulsions. But these two compulsions are sort of at odds with each other. Though if you subscribe to Dave Razowsky, then you also kind of subscribe to Buddhism (at least on stage). Don’t believe me? Read this interview. His improv philosophy greatly reflects the Buddhist mentality of being completely in the moment, and being completely aware of the impulses you’re feeling. Not judging them, just being aware of them.

So here’s another piece of Buddhism for you: It’s impossible to solve all of your problems. The desire to do so is in fact a problem. But instead, become aware of problems, without judgment. “See them.” I’ve outlined a problem for you, and it’s often an unconscious one. Do I know how to solve it? Nope!* But I do know how to make you aware of it, and in gaining awareness, you may lose your fear of it.

Here’s an exercise. It gets players used to:

(1) Playing from their gut and tapping into their compulsions

(2) Realizing when a scene needs to end, independent of everything else

(3) Evaluating whether or not their idea is good for the show and still relevant

Have your group do two-person scenes. During each scene, have players on the backline raise their hand when they think the scene should be edited. When a few players raise their hand at the same time, that’s probably a good spot to end the scene.

As a bonus, take note of who is raising their hands and when. (It’s an interesting insight into how you collectively play.)

Ask for a new scene, and repeat this a few times. Players will put their hands up at different times, and that’s OK. There can be a few good places to edit. Once players feel comfortable with calling for edit points, change gears.

This time, have them put up their hand during scenes when they’re inspired to do something. When a few people have their hand up and the scene reaches a good edit, pause the scene, ask a player with their hand up if their idea is still relevant or if they still want to do it, and have them come in. It might be that the time has passed, in which case, move on to the next person with their hand up. Do this for a while.

After this is comfortable, put the two together. Have players raise their left hand if they think the scene is done, right hand if they have an idea. Ask them to put their hand down if they are no longer compelled to follow the idea. The coach should call the scenes when a few people agree on an edit point, and ask somebody with their right hand up to initiate their idea.

This sounds clunky, and it is. It’s not really how an improviser should improvise, as it requires some mental juggling on the backline.  Its goal is to make improvisers aware of what’s happening inside them. The purpose of the exercise is not to fix anything. It’s not to make people think more, or less, or play differently. Just to “see”, as a Buddhist might say. Just to become aware of what hesitancy is at its core. I was surprised at the results when I did this with the longform team I coach, Surprise Romance Elixir, and they were too. Give it a try, and lose your fear of being on the backline!

*OK, I said I don’t know how to deal with these two competing compulsions, but that’s not exactly true. In certain situations, I do. And the balance changes depending on the type of show I’m in.

If it’s a Harold, then it’s extremely important to edit in a timely fashion. And you don’t need a fully-formed premise to initiate a scene in a Harold, either. So I’m letting my editing compulsion dominate.

But if I’m doing a narrative show, where the team is crafting a story around a protagonist, then I better have an idea in mind for where I’m taking the story if I initiate a scene, even if it means letting a scene go a bit longer than it should. And if I don’t have a good idea of where to take it, well then, I’m gonna hope somebody else does!

But how you personally balance these two compulsions is a tough conversation to be having unless you can actually recognize when these compulsions happen. You should be able to point to them and say “That’s when my brain thought this scene was over, and that’s when I got the idea to initiate clown medical school.” Which is precisely the point of the above exercise. Try it!

Photo © Kevin Patrick Robbins

We’ve written a few posts about physicality, and how it can change your character, literally from the inside out.

When I change my physicality onstage, the scene becomes effortless. Suddenly it’s not me standing in my usual one-leg-locked stance; it’s another entity with their own point of view, and I don’t have to think about how to respond because my physicality almost pushes the words out of me.

This TEDX Talk with Joe Dispenza is fascinating, because it explains how the different parts of our brain inform our behaviour. It also explains how taking physical action helps to create new neural networks – and thus determine who we become.

Dispenza was featured in the film What the Bleep Do We Know!? Click here to see the TEDX video.

Photo © Kevin Thom

Photo © Kevin Thom

David Razowsky is.

If that’s a little too Zen for you, he’s a master improvisation teacher, actor and director who’s worked with DreamWorks, Steppenwolf, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris. He’s also the former Artistic Director of The Second City Training Centre.

I had the privilege of speaking with him about his approach to improv, life, and everything.

Photo © Kevin Thom

“The minute you let go of ego, you will surprise the shit out of yourself.” – David Razowsky

P&C: You’ve started teaching a course at iO West called “You,” that comes before students learn the Harold. Why is that important?

DR: I think people get caught up in the need for structure. It’s why you teach children to like religion, because it’s a structure. And then you’ve gotta let them leave when they want to, y’know, because it’s a structure that you’re gonna look at.

Until you know how to improvise, you shouldn’t be doing the structure. Because you’re adding so many things onto… you’re layering so many things. It’s like, “Get all these fucking blankets off me. I don’t need any of these blankets, just get them off me.”

So you’re saying, “How does this structure work?” “What is it that I do now?” And all of these fucking questions, as opposed to, “What is the foundation of everything that I’m doing?” And the foundation is really a relationship that you have with your partner. Everything else is built around that.

If you’re doing a structure, I don’t care what it is, and you don’t know how to improvise, you’re gonna be drowning in ego. Drowning in judgement and self-doubt and all that stuff. But at the end of the day if you know how to connect with somebody, you can do whatever you wanna do. Anything.

So what this class is teaching is, you to give yourself permission for you to evolve. You give yourself permission for you to artistically evolve, and for you to know that what you’re thinking is great. But you’ve got to know that you know it. It’s about you being present, and that’s what this class teaches. It teaches presence.

P&C: You’ve been performing with Carrie Clifford for some time now. What do you like about a two-person show versus a larger group? Do you think you can accomplish different things with a two-person dynamic than you can with a larger team?

DR: Oh for sure. With a two-person show, working with Carrie specifically, we can watch a relationship grow. And that’s why I think people come to theatre, is to watch these two characters build a relationship and grow from there.

Working with Carrie, it’s a very positive experience, she’s a very joyful person, and to be connected to somebody so joyful, it makes you feel joyful to watch it.

It’s never work. It’s just two people who are unfolding, evolving, and not working. We listen to each other very, very well. And we don’t just emotionally listen to each other, we’re deep-tissue listening to each other. I’m aware of where she wants a certain character to go, or to stop, or to move, and I’m aware of all that.

But that’s what you get out of working with any group, is listening to what they’re saying without them having to voice it. And I listen to what Carrie’s saying, even though she never voices it. She may say one thing, but I know that’s not what her intentions are. And that’s not to say that she’s confusing, it’s to say that I know one thing will come out of her mouth, but she clearly wants me to do something else.

Any group that you work with, if you don’t have listening, you don’t have anything. And I’m gonna go back to your question about the structure.

If you’re listening to the ego or your teacher within you, telling what you need to do or have to do in order to get this math equation working, you’re not able to connect to yourself emotionally to know where this person lives, emotionally lives.

In a group you have entrances and exits and you get to fuck around with more people, but it all goes along the same lines. If people aren’t listening, if people have agendas, it’s going to be hard.

To be honest with you, I don’t have a problem with that because I don’t play with those people. I will play with a group of people, but I will not play more than once with a group of people who have an agenda. I will play with you once if you have an agenda, then I will not play with you again. That is all. I am done. I’ve got enough, no more thanks. No, I won’t take it to go; you eat it.

P&C: Do you ever have what you would call a “bad show” anymore? Do you ever judge your performances?

DR: I think I mentioned to y’all that I don’t think I’ve had a bad show since the late ‘80s. I know that sounds weird, but something happened one day where I decided, I’m not gonna judge myself that way. I’m not gonna look at it as, Did I have a good show? Did I have a bad show?

I’m gonna look at it and think, Did I have fun? Did I listen to people? Did I forward the action? If I did find myself having an agenda, how did that work out for me? It probably didn’t work out well, and then I’d think, OK, I’m not going to do that again.

So the way that I look at it is, every single performance is a class, and if I’m not learning from me, I can’t learn. So it’s been 20 years, 25 years, whatever it’s been since I’ve really looked at the performance I do in that moment in a negative way.

But I think it has a lot to do with your attitude. What’s your attitude about everything? You can say, Did you have a bad show?, or Did you have a bad day?, or Did you have a bad experience at the supermarket? And I’ll go, No, No, No.

You know, I look at people’s facebook status and it’s like: “I’m having a hell of a day.” It’s like, keep publishing that… It’s boring to me, it’s just boring. If you wanna do it that’s great, I’m not gonna knock it, but I don’t want any part of it.

P&C: You have a very Zen approach to improv. Which came first, your interest in improv, or your interest in those kind of teachings?

DR: Improv first, and then I fell into that. I remember clearly when I fell into that. I remember it so clearly: I was at LAX, and I was about to take an American flight to Santa Cruz for the improv festival they had up there.

I went to the bookstore at the American Airlines terminal and I saw a book that said Buddhism Plain and Simple, and I thought, “Oh, it’s plain and simple. I’ll buy it.” It was written by a guy named Steve Hagen, and I bought it and I thought, “This speaks to me. This speaks to me! Everything that he’s saying speaks to me.”

And once that started happening I started to read more about those things. It washed over me in a way where I’d find myself being in an improv scene and saying, “OK, this is a wonderful place for me to practice some of this Buddhist stuff that monk Hagen was talking about.”

And as it went on I was thinking, “That worked.” To be present, to be here in the moment. Not to be ahead of myself or behind myself, but just to be here. Not to have any idea of where it’s going to go. To know that if I find myself in a place where I’m confused, to be confused.

And that is such an important thing, because in improvisation you may say, “This scene isn’t going where I want it to be.” Well, where is it? It’s “I’m confused right now,” or “I’m lost now.”

That’s the gift that you give yourself, you give yourself the gift of acknowledging what you’re feeling in that moment, and being A-OK with it because really, there’s nothing else you can do.

When I’m in an improv scene and I feel like I’m lost, it’s like, what a gift I just gave myself. I gave myself the gift of presence. I gave myself the gift of what it is that I’m doing in this moment.

I know certain people are gonna look at it and go, “You don’t know anything about Buddhism,” and it’s like, you got me on that one. I’ve read a couple of books, and I do this practice that people look at and go, Oh that’s Zen, and it’s Buddhism, and it’s like, that’s great. If that’s what it is, great.

All that I know is these precepts. I don’t need to codify it, I don’t need to tell you where it came from, it doesn’t really matter… at the end of the day, my experience in the moment with you while I’m in that scene is all that fucking matters.

And I also believe that it helps your life. So that came, and then what ended up happening was it just spilled over into the rest of my life. Where I started to gravitate towards people that had that same sort of feeling, without even really knowing it. Someone would say, “You’re talking about presence.” It’s like, Oh! We’re speaking this secret code that everybody feels but no one talks about.

A lot of people go, “Yeah, this is all mumbo jumbo.” And I just wanna go, Sure, if you say so. It’s not up to me if you’re gonna get it. I’m living it. I’m living it. I can teach it to you, or you can just watch me. Right now I’m living it, and that’s OK.

P&C: You prefer the term “actor” to “improviser.” Why is that?

DR: It cuts right to it. Because if you say you’re an improviser, you then want to put an improv structure on something that you’re going to get to anyway, and that is, you’re acting. You are acting. No matter what, you are acting.

If you wanna tell me, “Yeah, I just improvised. I’m an improviser, I’m not acting,” I wanna say, All right, you explain to me what the difference is.

Because if I’m gonna tape you and show a performance of you improvising, and then I’m gonna tape somebody who’s reading scripted material and I show it to the average person, they’re not gonna know what the fucking difference is anyway, because it doesn’t matter.

At the end of the day the end product is the end product. In Spain, they make something called pan. Here we make bread. It doesn’t taste any different.

What it also does is, one may think, “I don’t wanna be classified as an actor.” Why the fuck not?

And here’s another thing. If I say to you, “I want to pay you to act,” you go, “Ohhh, great!” If I say to you, “I’m gonna pay you to improvise,” you may be expecting less money.

P&C: (laughs) I’d say that’s probably 100% true.

DR: You might go, “OK, maybe I’ll get enough for a couple beers.” But if I say I’m gonna pay you to act, you’re like, “Ooooh, pay me to act.”

Another thing: when you look at acting – all improvisation is acting – you’re able to look at all behaviour as inspiration for you to engage with. Whereas in improvising people sit in fucking chairs and that’s all they do.

I wanna say if you’re an actor, let’s talk about blocking. Let’s talk about duration. Let’s talk about shape. Let’s talk about object work. Let’s talk about all those things.

But let’s not talk about all those things in terms of, that’s what an improviser does. Let’s talk about all those things in terms of, this is what an actor does. Let’s talk about all those things in terms of, this is what an artist does.

Let’s talk about the fact that if you’re an artist, if you’re a painter, you know what each fucking brush does, you know what the nap of the brush is, you know what all that stuff does. But an improviser is lazy. It’s lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy! (laughs)

Although there’s a lot of people I love watching who aren’t fucking lazy. But they’re not lazy because they’re really thinking about, present to and mindful of all that’s occurring to them, at the time that they’re doing it.

But I’m certain of that difference there.

Also if I say to you, you’re an actor… Anyone who’s reading this right now, if you say to yourself, “I’m an improviser,” it’s a narrow thought. And the energy of that is narrow. If I say to myself, “I’m an actor,” if I admit to myself that I’m an actor, I’ve got thousands of years of help behind me. As opposed to “I’m an improviser.”

People have been improvising for as long as they’ve been acting. But if I call myself an actor, I get to be broader. And I don’t mean to be bigger on stage or chew up the scenery or ham-fisted; I mean broader in terms of my base knowledge. Broader in terms of everything that’s going on onstage.

P&C: Sometimes Cameron will come home from a show and he’ll say, “I had a scene tonight and there weren’t a lot of laughs, but some people may have, if not cried, maybe felt a different emotion than the usual…” and he’s excited when that happens.

DR: But what you’re saying there is very interesting as well. It’s also, what’s your expectation from the audience? Because if you call yourself an actor, you don’t have an expectation that the audience needs to be fucking guffawing every minute. And the pressure is a lot, the potential to have the ego come in… The pressure is diminished, because you don’t have expectations from the audience when you call yourself an actor.

Now people are going to come to the show and they’re gonna expect improvisation but you know what? You’re improvising. If someone comes to an improv show and they don’t know that you’re improvising it’s like, Did you have a bag over your head, and you were kept in a box and then just released into this room?

That’s why I also feel like, I don’t take suggestions. I fucking don’t take them. If you don’t know that I’m improvising… And half the time that you take a suggestion the audience doesn’t remember.

P&C: I haven’t seen you improvise with Carrie, but I’ve seen TJ and Dave a number of times and they just start their thing. They don’t need this artifice of a word to get rolling.

DR: Right? Carrie and I have a bunch of videos online…

P&C: Oh great, I’ll check those out.

DR: There’s at least three produced shorts that we’ve done that are totally improvised. There’s one called Lambrusco, Mediterranean Diet, Ovened Bread, Marathon, and Maladies.

The one that I would watch first is Ovened Bread. It’s about ten minutes long, and it looks totally scripted. It looks so scripted. We didn’t go back, we didn’t re-edit it. It was just two cameras. Carrie’s husband put two cameras out and he was directing it. As this camera’s on here, he would move this camera around so it looked like three cameras.

P&C: Who are your acting heroes? Whose work do you admire?

DR: I’m thinking about somebody that I just saw that I thought, Oh my God I love everything that they do. She played Bob Dylan in that Bob Dylan movie…

P&C: Cate Blanchett?

DR: Cate Blanchett, I love her. I love her so much. Tilda Swinton, I love her. Meryl Streep… I’m one of those guys. Look, I just named three women. Oh, Steve Buscemi. Johnny Depp… Only because I like these guys, like, they know who the fuck they are. It’s like, “This is who the fuck I am.”

In terms of comedy I really like Kristen Wiig. I really like her a lot… [I’d] better get some men in there. (laughs)

I love Pasquesi. I think he’s fucking great. I really like David a lot; I like what he does. That’s plenty right there, right?

P&C: That’s great.

(In Part Two, we discuss David’s Viewpoints approach to improv, his experience at Second City with Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, and how not to get your scene partner “on you.”)

Photo © The Dallas Comedy Festival

“Very often the improviser will move because they ‘feel like it.’ To their partner that movement might not make sense, because it might not have been motivated by something they’ve said.

When we’re aware of our movement (“Spatial Relationship” in Viewpoints-speak), we’re using our movement to help us make our point or emphasize our point.

Often I’ll move when I’m at a loss for what to say, then I’ll discover what I want to say once I’ve landed. It’s not stalling, it’s actually part of my character’s evolution.”