The lunch invitation I sent Pam Victor last week was good timing, much to my delight. Victor is, after all, the queen of timing. Onstage and in workshops across the country, her talent for comedy and improvisation speaks for itself.
But she also seems to have mastered a more everyday timing: juggling classes, performances, travel, and writing projects with aplomb. She is a founder of the local improv troupe The Ha-Ha’s and the creator of a multi-level curriculum called the Zen of Improv, which she teaches regularly.
Over Thai food in Amherst, she chatted with me about what makes people try improv, and stick with it — in particular the local women who have made her classes into “a feminist comedy utopia.”
That’s unique to the Valley?
Yeah. The Ha-Ha’s started out all-women, as the Ha-Ha Sisterhood. Even now, my classes are about 80 percent women, and the local improv community, until very recently, was the same.
Women are really good improvisers, but the improv world, nationally, is predominantly men. The typical improviser is a 25-year-old white man in a plaid shirt and Converse. In some cities, you have to play more aggressively as a woman to keep getting gigs. But not here. Here, there’s nowhere to go. We improvise because we love to improvise.
People associate improv with comedy, but the two don’t always go hand in hand, right?
Right. I call myself a comedian sometimes, but I’m not performing improv for the comedy. The comedy is a side effect of good improvisation. If you try for funny, you’ll either hit Funny or Not Funny. But if you try for good improv, you can hit all sorts of smart, amusing, interesting things along the way.
Would all comedians benefit from trying improv, even if their focus is not improv comedy?
I think all humans would benefit from improv! It’s good for you, mentally and physically, and you can forget your regular life for two hours.
You’ve just wrapped up an interesting life project. Tell us about that.
From August 2014 to August 2015 I did an experiment: can I make a living doing what I love? I had finished ten years of homeschooling my son, so I knew I could either go back to teaching preschool or see if I could make a living through improvisation, teaching, writing, workshops for personal growth, corporate improv classes, performing, and producing.
I set a dollar goal of $16,000, which is the poverty line for a family of two. And I was blogging about it all along, so it was extremely transparent. It was scary, but people were rooting for me. They gave me jobs. My students kept signing up for classes. It worked out.
That amount is very small for normal humans. But for improvisers it’s almost impossible to achieve. I know hundreds of improvisers, and I can think of about 12 who can make a living through improv.
If someone told you that they wanted to try what you just did last year, what advice would you give them?
I’d say go for it, 100 percent. Life is too short to be unhappy. But my advice is: you have to fucking hustle. You can’t just sit there and think it’s going to come to you. I worked seven days a week, 12+ hours a day, for over a year. When you’re a small business owner, it’s really, really hard. You have to believe in yourself well beyond any observable measure of your abilities.
In other words: Fake it ’til you make it.
Exactly. Tina Fey said that confidence is 10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion. It’s easy to talk yourself out of doing what you’d prefer to do — I see people doing that all the time. So, I just had to set aside the whole concept of my success or failure.
Case in point: the book I just wrote [with performers T.J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi, called Improvisation at the Speed of Life]. I had no idea how to write a book.
Who are T.J. and Dave?
They’re legendary Chicago improvisers. Maybe the most highly-regarded improvisers in the world.
But improv is spontaneous, right? How do you write a book about how to be spontaneous?
We talk about the basic skills about how to get into that place of spontaneity. It needs to be in the moment, and listening, and paying attention. How to listen? I like to say that you have to turn off your judgmental mind.
I entered that book project like a bull in a china shop. I told them: I think I should write your book, what do you think? They like my work — I interviewed them for my Geeking Out With… series online, so we did it.
I don’t let opportunities pass me by. I try to live my life by the tenets of improv, and that’s one of them. Like one of the fathers of improv, Del Close, said: you fall, then figure out what to do on the way down. You have to constantly jump into the void and practice catching each other.
That hasn’t let you down? You haven’t fallen so hard that you wish you hadn’t jumped?
Never.
Do you still feel that moment of hesitation when you jump into a new project?
Yes, but I’m getting better at it. Every time I do it, it gets less and less difficult.
Last weekend I was flown out to a theater in San Francisco to teach a two-day intensive. I took that job through someone I met at the Applied Improv Network World Conference in Montreal. Then in February I’ll be in Florida on a two-week tour. I’m going to five or six cities to teach.
Are those workshops at improv theatres?
Yes, but I also run a program called Through Laughter, which uses improv for professional and personal growth. I’ve done those workshops at the Northampton Survival Center, for women executives, for nurses at the Ludlow prison, for employees at Baystate, Amherst College, UMass …
One thing I put front and center is that you don’t have to be funny, and you don’t have to have experience. All you have to have is a willingness to try. That’s one of the things I love so much about improv — it’s about disempowering failure. No matter what you say, you can’t make a mistake. I’ve learned more through my mistakes than my successes. A bad show teaches me a lot more than a good show.
Are people in your workshops playing characters, or are they playing themselves?
The way I teach, you start by playing a neutral character that’s pretty close to yourself. Del Close said: wear your character as a thin veil. Your authenticity is the thing that makes you wonderful to watch. So, when we first play a scene, we’re stepping into a neutral character’s shoes, and the more you learn about them over the course of a scene, the more you can distinguish them.
People often see improv not as an art but as a lifestyle. Once you’re in it, you’re hooked. It makes you feel good, but it also has a positive impact on the rest of your life. It’s really powerful. Most of my students don’t do it because they want to get up on stage and perform. They just came into it on a whim, and now they can’t stop doing it.
How many of your students go on to perform for general audiences?
About half of the students who come out are looking to book gigs. That’s how you grow an improv community.
Are you optimistic about that growth locally?
Yes. If you build it, they will come. A year ago, I thought I had run out of people interested in taking improv. Now I can’t teach enough classes. They fill up very quickly.
This trend is happening all over the United States right now. One person wants to do it in their dad’s barn. A year later, there’s a scene. Three years later, they’re hosting a festival and getting national improvisers to come in and teach classes. It’s weird.
Why does that happen?
It’s partly because kids are doing more and more improv on college campuses. After they graduate, the super-serious ones move to Chicago or New York or LA. They join groups like Second City, the Groundlings, and Upright Citizens Brigade. But improv also good to people who are just trying it out. You can just watch Whose Line is it, Anyway? and try to do what they do. You can find your way into it.
And the quality of the improv, unlike other performance art, can only be determined while it’s happening.
Right. We were asked recently to perform for a man in hospice care. It was a huge honor, and really challenging. We couldn’t ignore the fact that this was one of the last times his friends would be there with him, watching our show. I kept wishing that I just had a stand-up act — that my words could be set and practiced in advance.
But you have to let that go. It’s like being up on a high wire, but on the other hand, improvisers are the most supportive people you’ll ever meet in your life.
This skill set you’re describing — self-awareness, patience, listening, letting go — is so fundamental. It’s basically sounds like training on how to be a good person.
It applies to all corners of life. You have to see, over and over, that what we create together is more beautiful than what we can create alone. You keep getting proof of that, through practice.•
Follow Pam Victor’s exploits — or sign up for a workshop — at happiervalley.com.
Contact Hunter Styles at hstyles@valleyadvocate.com.
