“Why can’t you just take a joke?”
“Just go with it”
“You’re ruining this for everyone”
Improv has one rule: no matter what happens, you can’t say ‘no’. You just have to take whatever people give you and go along with it. This might scare you at first, but you’ll soon get used to it, and if you want to join in, that’s just how it goes. This is the epitome of the lad culture that we put so much time and energy into combatting in other parts of life, including aspects of comedy. Why do we put up with it here?
We’ve fought to assert our equal right to exist in this sausage-fest of an industry. And more than that, to exist safely, and to have just as good a time of it. To be taken into equal consideration, as opposed being grudgingly tolerated. But when it comes to improv, those lad-culture-in-a-nutshell practices are protected as ‘just how it is’. And as with lad culture, while it’s not impossible to participate when you’re not a “Default Male”*, the only way you can is by assimilating by some degree to that maleness. Which is fine if you’re up for it. But it shouldn’t alienate people who aren’t.
Many people first try comedy in uni, and comedy societies are supposed to be a safe, low-risk way for students to dip a toe in. Improv is the main function of a lot of those societies, as well as many people’s gateway into comedy and performance. Moreover, some people pursue improv as their main thing. And so they should. Because when it’s done well, improv can be really funny. But when it’s done badly, it’s hurtful to both audience and performers.
And it’s really fucking hurtful. What default males don’t seem to understand when they make rape jokes, for instance, is that rape isn’t some abstract concept. It’s a real act of violence real people suffer at the hands of others, often resulting in long-term trauma. When you make a rape joke, you’re laughing about some part of that specific act of violence. And shocking though it might be to some default males, not everyone finds violence hilarious.
But when someone you’re in a scene with makes one of those jokes in improv, you can’t block it. Blocking (saying no to something you don’t like/want to do) is the one thing you can’t do. If you block, you’re ruining it. You’re humiliated, your team’s humiliated, and it’s all your fault. It takes a skilled improviser to take a harmful suggestion and subvert a scene, and politically astute people rarely get to that stage because they feel too alienated to continue.
So if you’re not comfortable with a suggestion, you can’t do anything but go with it. And these jokes are likelier than anywhere else to happen, because when you’re under pressure to say something, anything, you say the first thing that comes into your head, and given how conducive improv is to lad culture, the likelihood of that being hurtful to non-default males is uncomfortably high. Indeed such jokes are encouraged as they get an easy reaction.
This isn’t to say that improv needs to be banned on feminist grounds. However, it’s clear that improv needs to take a long, hard look at itself, and that many of its practices do need consigning to the bin. It remains to be seen what would be left.
*refers to an article by Grayson Perry in the New Statesman, from the issue he guest edited.
